When the Sun Is Highest in the Sky

Sitting on his front porch recently, a friend of mine noticed an eagle wheeling over the house across the street.

Here in Minneapolis, we're nowhere very far from the Mississippi Valley, and we're blessed with a healthy urban eagle population. Still, it's not exactly common to see them in this neighborhood, where there's not a lot to draw them.

A few days later, my friend saw the eagle—or an eagle, at least—again, over the same house.

A day or two after that, he saw it a third time.

When next he talked with his neighbor, he mentioned seeing the eagle over her house.

His neighbor is Dakota. She hadn't seen the eagle herself, but she didn't seem surprised to hear about it. She asked him what time of day he had seen it.

“Was it around the time when the Sun's highest in the Sky?” she asked.

Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.